There are many beautiful aspects to Communion & Liberation, a movement founded in Italy in 1954 by Fr. Luigi Giussani, which I have been blessed to take part in. Two of these aspects are illustrated here: the monthly CL magazine, “Traces,” and the poster that graces this month’s cover. CL has a tradition of these posters, one for Christmas, one for Easter each year, and they often feature quotations from Giussani and our Pope.
Here are the quotations from this year’s Christmas poster:Why does faith still have any chance at all? . . . Because it corresponds to the nature of man. . . . Man possesses an inextinguishable aspiration, full of nostalgia, for an infinite. None of the attempted answers will do; only the God who himself became finite in order to tear open our finitude and lead us into the wide spaces of his infinity, only he corresponds to the question of our being. That is why, even today, Christian faith will come to seek out man again.—Joseph Ratzinger
Now, with our failing muscles, with our exhaustion, with our propensity for melancholy, with this strange masochism that life tends to favor nowadays, or with this indifference and cynicism that life produces nowadays as a way of avoiding the suffering of an excessive and unwanted fatigue, how could we ever accept ourselves and others in the name of a discourse? We cannot sustain love for ourselves unless Christ is a presence, as a mother is a presence for her child. Unless Christ is a presence now—now!—I cannot love myself now and I cannot love you now.—Luigi Giussani
